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The Bluest Eye
or praise ever was instilled in her.
Her only real friends are the other two main characters in the story, Frieda and Claudia MacTeer. However, they are relatively powerless in helping her and her situation. All they can do is pray for her and hope that everything will turn out ok. At one point on the playground they stick up for Pecola and save her from the taunting boys. “You cut that out, you hear?...Leave her ‘lone...”(Morrison 66). That is the extent to which they can save Pecola.
All of the isolation, self-blame, and negativity of Pecola’s life finally escalates when she in the kitchen washing dishes and her father, who is extremely drunk, becomes overwhelmed with sexual desire and rapes his young daughter. This incestual act does nothing but bring out more sympathy for the protagonist. In using the causal argument one sees that this terrible act is brought on by Pecola’s ugliness and her inability to meet society’s standard of beauty. Cholly is full of rage from his unhappy childhood and his unsatisfying life. He drowns this consciousness of this rage in drink. It is this rage that poor Pecola inherits, and it is this rage that rapes her. The result is that a child who had sought so desperately for acceptance and friendship and escape from the frightening scenes of her parent’s battles is raped by this rage; what voice she had is ripped away from her in this tremendous and overwhelming act of paternal violence.
Pecola than becomes pregnant and is asked to leave school. It is during this time that she begins to slip into her madness. She develops an imaginary friend to whom she speaks about her “new blue eyes.” She was given these blue eyes by Soaphead Church, the town Psychic and Spiritualist, who convinced her that if she fed an old dog some food, which actually had poison mixed in it, and he had an erratic reaction, she would be given blue eyes. She fed the dog and after convulsing for several minutes, he died. Soaphead Church validates Pecola’s wish for blue eyes affirming the correctness of her rejection of her race. With her new friend, Pecola talks about how blue and beautiful her eyes are and how jealous everyone is of them. The reader learns, that even this internal dialoguing of Pecola does not bring her solace, because she is afraid the eyes given her by Soaphead Church are not blue enough.
Throughout the book, the reader mostly sees Pecola as others see her. People see her as an ugly child and this one label is the most significant aspect of her life. Pecola also sees herself as others have seen her, and for this reason thinks of herself as being ugly. It is important for the reader to understand that this is her reality. It is the overriding factor that pushes her fantasy of blue eyes from a black girl’s wish to have things white to a neurotic fantasy to make things right.
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